The New York City DOT came to us with a startling statistic: When a pedestrian is struck at 30mph by a vehicle, there is an 80% chance they will survive. If a pedestrian is struck at 40mph, there is a 70% chance they will die. 10mph, a seemingly subtle difference while you are behind the wheel, is the difference between life and death as a pedestrian.

As part of the DOT’s ‘that’s why it’s 30’ campaign, the barbarians took it to the streets.Using the DOT’s wanco matrix sign, a speed radar, and 48×27 dot matrix (think microsoft paint), we created a speed board to remind New Yorkers to slow down. The speed board displays a graphic of the familiar pedestrian walking man, with the posted speed limit of 30mph.

The on board radar detects passing cars speed, and if a car breaks the limit, the pedestrian changes to a skeleton, with SLOW DOWN in giant letters.

Henry Lai came up with the skeleton graphic. This was an exercise in classic video game illustration, adhering to just a simple dot-matrix with lit or non-lit pixels. Originally we had created looping animations for each state of the pedestrian, a walking man, and a walking skeleton.

This not only violated the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices by using rapid flashing and animation… But we also learned that we only had 2-6 seconds of display time, a 48×27 pixel grid, and 2KB of ram to play with.

In the end, the two frames were plenty. The boards are starting to roll out around the city, and we are hugely proud to have worked on something that can get drivers to slow down, and keep pedestrians safe.